I'm Co-Chair of EA Bath Uni Group, and therefore manage the WhatsApp community for it. A common problem people have in university society group chats is that scammers and bots often join, so to prevent this, every time someone requests to join the group chats, I message them and ask if they are a real student.
If they are a real student, I then ask them how they heard about EA, and usually follow up with something like
'Oh, that's really cool! Would you be okay to meet so I can explain what EA is about and what EA Bath offers? Or alternatively chat on text / have a call?'
In our 1-1, I summarise my intro talk as a summary of what EA is, and then explain our fellowship that we are running at the university, and finish up by showing some EA resources (e.g. EA Forum, 80K Problem Profiles). This then usually results in them attending at least one session – with a few attending more.
I think this is really effective for reducing friction when asking for 1-1s, as it makes it seem a lot more casual and gives a purpose to the conversation, and although it would not replace any other methods of community building, I think it is a good addition that may have been overlooked.
To prevent bots and too many inactive accounts, we only add people to our local group's Signal chat that we have met in person or that someone already knows. Also, remember that you can reset the invite link. This can help when you get overrun by bots.
I think it makes sense to make it not too easy for people to get access to the group chat so that it feels private and personal, so people are less shy about writing there.
We still need a good way of handling the problem of inactive accounts in the Signal group. If a person turned up only once three years ago, maybe they no longer need to be in the group. But what is a good way of having an overview, which accounts can be removed and which can't? Especially one that has as little overhead as possible. Does any of you have any Ideas about that? How do you handle this?
We currently have about 90 accounts in our group chat and maybe 20 or so people that actually write stuff in there and that come to events. I'd like to bring these two numbers closer together, so new people don't think they write to 90 people when something like 70 of them will probably never read it.
This sounds like a good idea. I guess some people join through the community through the freshers fair / student union page, which is why I check.
This is true! I guess I haven't bothered, as I would have to change the links elsewhere, e.g. on the student union page, which is probably low effort, so maybe I should.
This is also a good point.
Good question. EA Bath has only been around for just over a year, but last year we had a main group chat in the whatsapp community that had too many people, so our chair deactivated the group chat and made a new one that the more active members could join – and posted a link to the new chat in the group chat before deactivating. So I guess you could remake the group chat every year so that the newer/active members can rejoin it? And then you could call it 'EA (insert group name) 2025' or something.
The bot battle is real 😳
Thanks for sharing!
Agreed! You’re welcome :)
Hang on - why do you have to be a student to join an EA group?
Oh, sorry, I should clarify – this is a university EA group, and is therefore directed at students. We have had a couple non students – who have joined the University later, but I more meant that I'm checking they're not a bot, and are a real person.
This seems like a really good thing to do, nice!